To celebrate 13 weeks of winter, Winterviews is conducting interviews with various book and author communities across the internet. Once a week, we’ll interview a new community to find out what makes that community great.
Join us on the hashtag #13Winterviews, or join in the fun with tonight’s community spotlight, #Thurds Words with A.B. Funkhauser! Without further ado, lets get down to the interview!
Can you tell us a little bit about #Thurds?
#Thurds Words @thurdswords is a Twitter hashtag game for writers from all genres appearing every Thursday. The word itself is a mashup of “Thursday” and “words” created at a time when tweets were limited to 120 characters and successful game creators knew to keep hashtags short. Each week, a new prompt appears, and writers are invited to post as many lines as they wish from works in progress (WIPS) or published work. #Thurds also allows buy links as long as the required one liner is attached. We have been well received, I think, because of this flexibility. After years of hard work on a WIP, it’s key to the creative process that writers be able to share that publishing moment with art and links so that others in the community can #shoutout and hopefully draw from it to get their scripts to the finish line.
What prompted the idea to start #Thurds?
#Thurds Words will celebrate its fourth birthday in April this year. Four years ago, I noticed, as an avid writer hashtag player, that there wasn’t anything going on on Thursday’s. The rest of the week was covered with genre-specific themed 1-line games, but poor old Thursday seemed to fall through the cracks. A Tuesday game master pointed out the obvious: Why not create your own? There you go.
What is unique about #Thurds?
I’m really proud to see how #Thurds Words has grown. Every year, I send out a holiday card in December with the players’ Twitter handles printed on it. The first year had about 75 names. This year, there were 600++. Many of our flagship players still participate. Again, I think it’s because we encourage buy links and cover art from finished work and we encourage lines from those works to continue to appear each week. The idea is not that we are selling to one another, although we do buy from time to time. The idea is to celebrate a finished WIP through #RT’s and congratulatory comments. We also ask community members to share their successes, such as requests for full and partials. I figured out early on that the games were crucial to keeping me writing every day. Others say that #Thurds helps them to do the same.
Why is having a community helpful?
There’s the old safety in numbers ethos, the joy that comes from knowing that I belong to something. I also love seeing the group come back week after week with lines that trump the previous week’s work. I know that I’ve really learned how to trim the fat out of lines that need to fit inside a tweet, so this community has also strengthened my editing skills. And there is also a lot of joy that comes out of seeing a member get to the next level — first daft, second draft, final, query, published, promoted. It tells us that this writing thing can be done.
What three things does someone not know about you or #Thurds?
Lately, the game has been on the receiving end of some very original, sardonic commentary. I knew that #Thurds would get played on — “Yes, yes. Drop the ‘h’. We get it.” — and that it was important to address this with a sense of humor and willingness to clear up what we are about.
Last week, a Twitter visitor cleverly waxed on about the Republic of Thurdistan, while another linked us to insurgent groups operating out of the Eurasian continent. This kind of jokey banter did two things: 1) won over the jokers who commented with “Gotcha. Thanks for explaining.” and “Very cool.” and 2) attracted the attention of others who may not have come across us before. The number of follows that day on the game page and other linked platforms spiked, which means our participants’ lines also got that traffic.
Moderators peruse the game as it’s being played, so we are “live” as much as we can be. With time zone differences, we are late with rt’s and comments for some players, but we comb the feeds on Friday to make sure we see everyone’s post. We also send out player appreciation tweets on Friday’s although this is not done every Friday. It’s subject to where the moderators are on that particular day (life interferes). But I think the community gets that we are there, and we are retweeting the words. Sharing the words is a big thing with me.
The community sticks to the work at hand—getting the lines and links out there and retweeting fellow players. For those who jump in with ads for efficient flush toilets, offshore banks, and political stuff—no—you get blocked. With so many accommodating forums in the digiverse, we don’t need that stuff on #Thurds. I have noticed a lot of sponsored ads from banks and television shows; more so than ever before. Those are very annoying. At the same time, it might be an indicator that we’re a community of a size worth bothering.
What one tip did you learn from #Thurds?
Be generous. #RT. In doing so, you are giving a fellow writer the boost they need to keep going. Don’t worry about clogging your feed. I don’t know anyone who actually goes to a homepage on Twitter and reads the feed. Maybe they do? It’s never been a worry for me. It’s the hashtag feed that matters.
Any advice or quote that you live by?
Community is a Venn diagram; a series of overlapping circles where like properties intersect and spawn other circles. Okay, maybe that’s too groovy. How about this? One community leads to another and that’s how we grow as people and writers. Through #Thurds Words, I have found other hashtags where other writers trying to do the same thing hang out. I follow and retweet those writers too. And so, we keep growing and learning.
#Thurds words appears every Thursday on Twitter. New themes, aka #writingprompts, are posted at @thurdswords and @writevent.
LET’S GET READ
#Thurds Words is a Twitter hashtag game appearing every Thursday for writers from all genres.
Post lines to a theme each week from WIPs and Published work.
BUY LINKS WELCOME
See weekly theme/writing prompts @thurdswords or @writevent
Hosting Authors
A.B. Funkhauser
LET’S GET READ
